


SSSAW Writing Assignments

by EphemeralSonder (MermaidMayonnaise)



Category: Original Work, Several Short Sentences About Writing - Verlyn Klinkenborg
Genre: I'm so proud that I made a new fandom tag, Lang Summer Work 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-10 22:11:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20535413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MermaidMayonnaise/pseuds/EphemeralSonder
Summary: I wrote some nice essays that I'm proud enough to post. We had to choose 3 quotes and respond to them.





	SSSAW Writing Assignments

  1. Seven Quotes

One: 

We reason for him [the reader], filling our prose with approximations of logic,/ So he’ll feel he’s had a good think (138).

Two:

Many people assume there’s a correlation between the reader’s experience while reading and the writer’s experience while writing-- her state of mind, her ease or difficulty in putting words together. There isn’t.

(also, another quote with the same idea, so I put them together:

The reader’s experience of your prose has nothing to do with how hard or easy it was for you to make.../ The reader reads in another world entirely (67).)

Three:

The piece you’re writing is simply the one that happens to get written (108).

Four:

If you love to read-- as surely you must-- you love being wherever you find yourself in the book you’re reading,/ Happy to be in the presence of every sentence as it passes by,/ Not biding your time until  _ meaning _ comes along (26).

Five:

It [writing] was all change until the very last second (33).

Six:

A first piece of that kind is a tacit way of taking shelter under the authority of some else’s perceptions (37).

Seven:

It fails to realize that writing comes from writing...

Here’s a better approach./ Squander your material./ Don’t ration it, saving the best for last./ You don’t know what the best is./ Or the last (95).

  1. ITTA #1

_ The piece you’re writing is simply the one that happens to get written (108). _

This quote made me blink at the book in shock because the concept is  _ finally in words.  _ One of my hobbies is writing creatively, so much of this book made me very emotional because it made me realize that my problems were not only my own. Other people go through the pain of writing too.

While writing, it’s always a common experience to end up in a completely different place from where you started. When I first started creating substantial sized stories of twenty thousand words and more, I had a brief outline at the end of my document. It was simply titled ‘Plot’ and had about five bullet points that detailed where I wanted the story to go.

Looking back, that was incredibly naive.

With a speed that surprised myself, my story took a life of its own and wormed its way out from under my fingers. My very first story, composed of nineteen chapters and about 27 thousand words, went so far off the rails that I had to copy the outline and paste it in another document so it wouldn’t distract me. 

In a twist of irony, my ‘outline’ quickly turned into nothing more than me jotting down random thoughts that I noticed throughout the day. SSSAW mentioned that noticing things and writing them down was a part of writing as well. It wasn’t essential, however; you would remember the truly important things. (I did.)

When I sit down to write, I’m not particularly nervous about writer’s block. I figure that there’s always something interesting in my life that’s worth thinking about. It’s only a matter of letting my mind run free and snatching some of the thoughts to physically write down. When I look back at what I’ve written, I’m always amused because I can see the factors in my life on the page: books that I’ve read, what happened to me that day, a joke that made me laugh. 

It’s a mosaic of my life, a collage.

Writing could be considered a time capsule. My writing differs from day to day, hour to hour. What I would have written for this very essay in the morning would be drastically different than the one I am writing right now, late at night and post-rehearsal. I’ve concluded that the writing changes because  _ I _ change. As I make my merry way through life, I collect new ideas and experiences, which in turn influence how I think-- which impacts who I am.

I like to write all sorts of characters, but the current stories I’m working on feature adults. I’m finding writing them difficult, and after much deliberation I’ve figured out the simple reason why: I’m not an adult. It’s difficult to write adults going through their daily lives when I’ve never experienced being one. There’s jargon that I haven’t been exposed to, relationships within the workplace that I’m unfamiliar with. 

It’s easy to discern whether a work has been written by an adult or someone my age: you look at the actions and behavior of the characters. For example, take a shopping trip for a new granite counter. Writing the characters shopping for a counter would be difficult for me-- or worse, unrealistic-- simply because I’ve never done it before. They’d talk about quality, weight, the size of it in relation to their kitchen. Does that sound convincing, like I know what I’m talking about? I don’t, and it’s obvious.

In twenty or so years, I’m sure that I’ll know how to buy that granite counter, and my scene would be much more convincing. That was a very long-winded example that illustrates the view that writing is influenced by who you are at the time. When you have been exposed more experiences, the simple reality is that you have more to draw on.

When we’re younger, we’re constantly changing. I have a theory that because we have more years behind us when we get older, passing years become less and less significant when comparing them to the whole. In middle school, everyone went through phases that would pass in a year or so. You don’t see many adults go through dramatic phases, and I assume it’s because, for the most part, they’ve already figured out who they are. 

The writing of adults would still vary from their day to day, but most likely not as much as, for example, my writing now contrasted to my writing from last summer.

  1. ITTA #2

_ The reader’s experience of your prose has nothing to do with how hard or easy it was for you to make.../ The reader reads in another world entirely (67). _

Since I follow a plethora of writers online, I saw a post last week that talked about about the ‘ghost’ of writing. It relates to when the author has a more complex reaction when reading their work. There’s no separation between them and the story; they see the woodwork making up the writing. SSSAW talked about how writing is composed of thousands of minute decisions: word choice, sentence structure, etc. When rereading their work, the author can see those decisions, hence the ‘ghost.’

Which is why it’s always an experience reading my old writing. It’s a peek at the old me, a snapshot at where I was at the time. I see my thoughts, my ideas. I see where I’ve grown and improved, which is gratifying. When I come across prose that’s written just right, I’m proud of the way it zings. When I find something wrong, it’s an incredible urge to stop, zero in and criticize my errors. (That ‘something wrong’ doesn’t relate to typos, though I make many mistakes while typing and never catch all of them. I mean that sense in your inner ear that SSSAW mentioned, that slight sensation of wrongness.) I used to compulsively open the Google Doc that I had written the piece on and fix the errors in the writing as I reread, but I stopped. 

The reason that I stopped doing so was simple, even if the realization was extremely belated. Once I slammed my computer shut and proclaimed that the story was done: that’s it, it was  _ finished.  _

The reader, some might say sadly (and others might say gratefully) experiences none of this inner turmoil. They galavant happily through the story, only seeing the final, polished layer. They’re blissfully unaware of the ghostly fingerprints left across the page, the red scribbles and question marks that once demarcated and deleted. 

Writing is pain, and the sheer effort of creating, editing, and finishing a story is severely underestimated by those who don’t partake in it. Artists have the advantage of being able to film a time-lapse of their artwork, or at the very least post progress photos. A writer, for the most part, must suffer alone-- or with any luck, along with their editors. No reader wants to go into the history of the story’s Google Doc and scroll through hours and hours of the writer obsessively spent changing the same three words, rewriting entire paragraphs, and staring disgustedly at the blinking mouse on the page for an hour before logging off.

_ The reader reads in another world entirely.  _ This is a concrete fact, and SSSAW neatly articulates it. The world only exists within the author’s head in the beginning. In a way, that’s where it truly remains. The writer’s job is to communicate and translate that vivid and intense world onto paper. The result is always a little faded, a little muted; there’s simply no way to fully encapsulate that world in its entirety. It would be like trying to write a history of Earth from the beginning of earth in the perspective of everything upon it. And when you take fiction into account, it escalates into another dimension, where anything is possible. It’s infinite.

It’s then reasonable to assume that part of the world is lost in transition. It’s like the transfer of energy in physics, where a certain amount of energy is lost in the transition to heat. If part of the world is erased, then the reader automatically reads a different story than the one the author imagined. The reader’s experience is what’s on the page: nothing more and nothing less. Everything that’s communicated is done through the story alone. 

  1. ITTA #3

_ If you love to read-- as surely you must-- you love being wherever you find yourself in the book you’re reading,/ Happy to be in the presence of every sentence as it passes by,/ Not biding your time until meaning comes along (26). _

When I read this sentence, I dropped the book and scrambled for the highlighter. I then highlighted the entire passage, bracketed it, and starred it. It’s that important. When I flipped through to find the quotes, I saw my penciled-in note: _That’s why we love to read! _And the more I think about it, the more I realize that it’s true. Reading for pleasure isn’t about getting to the end, it’s about enjoying the ride. As cliche as it sounds, the journey matters more than the destination.

When I read on my Kindle, I make it a point to turn off and hide the progress bar at the bottom of the screen. Seeing the percentage sign as I finish the page bothers me because it  _ doesn’t matter.  _ This isn’t an assessment, where anything above a ninety percent is preferable and below is unacceptable. Just because I’m a third of the way through the book doesn’t mean that I’m a failure, or a terrible (or worse, slow!) reader; it means that I’ve read a third of the book. 

In my writing community, and I use the term loosely as I only hover upon the vestiges of it, there was a post that said one of the most helpful writing tips they ever received was to make every scene your favorite. Because if you don’t enjoy your  _ own _ writing, who else will? Every sentence, word, and scene has to be your favorite. If it’s not, improve it; if you can’t, remove it. There must be a reason why it shouldn’t be there.

It frustrates me to no end when people always look for meaning in a work. Why does everything have to mean something greater than what it stands for? You don’t to your room, look at the ratty toy that you always used to carry with you as a child that’s currently buried in your closet and say, “Ah, a perfect symbol for the loss of childhood innocence!” 

Some authors deliberately put symbols in their work to hint at the meaning, and others do it unintentionally. That’s perfectly acceptable; meaning enriches the work and our understanding of it as a whole. But when the entire purpose of reading the work is discovering its One True Meaning, that’s when it becomes problematic.

Reading isn’t getting to the end and having a ground-shattering catharsis; these flashes of inspiration and understanding should occur throughout the work. (This, in my opinion, is one of the essentials that differentiates a good writer from an excellent one. If I don’t put the book down to highlight and make notes, it’s unmemorable and bland. My favorites are always thoroughly annotated.) 

In no point of any piece of writing should the sole meaning occur at the end. Even an amateur essay would reveal its meaning at the beginning through its thesis statement. If the author begins writing with the sole purpose of establishing one single meaning in mind and takes the entirety of the work to get there, then the entire work is, quite simply, a waste of space. 

I think one of the most important points made in SSSAW is the assertion that writing and the thinking process are the same. Mr. Vandegrift said the same when we were writing our in-classes essays last year, and that was the way I approached them. Your best, your ‘meaning’ isn’t predetermined. The author will have many small revelations that will expand and build upon the original point. There is always more to be said and discovered through the process of writing; it’s not static, it’s a process.

  1. Balanced Review of Book

In an unexpected twist, I was drawn into SSSAW extremely early during the reading process. I entertain thoughts of myself as a burgeoning writer, having creatively written a substantial amount in the past year, and it was both gratifying and satisfying to see all of these thoughts and experiences that I’ve discovered throughout that time written down and explained.

That isn’t to say the SSSAW isn’t without its flaws. The author is infuriatingly smug and comes across condescending many more times than is strictly necessary. The assignment did warn me that this was inevitable, but it was frustrating nonetheless; when you’re reading this book to  _ learn,  _ it’s infuriating to be chastised for not knowing it yet.

But the feeling that I got from the book when I read the last page was incredible. When I reached the line  _ For the reader who reads between the lines,  _ my eyes watered slightly. Maybe it’s because I’ve never read any books about how to write to take something significant away from it, but that was the first time that it felt like someone truly understood the struggles and triumphs of writing. 

One of the book’s greatest strengths was its format. It took me a while to figure out why the author would consider choosing to write anything, much less a novel, in that particular style. The answer was in the title. Much as the author says, shorter sentences are clearer and more concise. Why would a reader voluntarily clutter their writing with prose when they could simply say what they mean?

I used to think that prose meant a more accomplished, intelligent reader. SSSAW quickly convinced me otherwise by writing, “They also try to bolster the apparent authority of your piece/ by echoing the apparent authority of other people/ who can’t write and who distrust their own thinking” (199). I particularly enjoyed his bashing of the public education system, agreeing with his idea that structures such as compare and contrast instantly limit the writing, which is frustratingly ironic as the options are supposed to infinite! However, he doesn’t expand on how public education could be improved; and while not the point of the book, the lack of it still left the writing feeling somewhat incomplete.

SSSAW is a novel of brevity, and a powerful one. It follows through on what it preaches and does it well. It bares and strips to the essentials of writing, thoroughly explaining and demonstrating along the way, purposely not ‘holding the reader’s hand’ while it’s doing so. Each concept is purposefully left open to the reader’s interpretation, and the effect is both thought-provoking and powerful.

**Author's Note:**

> My tumblr's mermaidmayonnaise.


End file.
